Re: The Thief/The Flibbertigibbet
Lili didn't wash for anything less than a half hour. It meant pails and pails of hot water carried in but she didn't mind that at all. Behind a screen she could lather up and just feel the heat in the bath climb as someone obliging and anonymous poured hot water in the other end, just a pair of hands. Lili didn't mind a pair of hands in the scheme of things, not if it benefited in the end. She liked to luxuriate in hot water and listen to a record for hours and hours and she had the pale, pearlescent skin of a woman well-scrubbed.
He was the kind of dirty-handsome that stoked blazes all over whatever city he was from, she could tell that. Looked like he knew it, too but that went without saying. Handsome men who didn't know they were handsome were either blind or foolish, Lili didn't know which. Handsome rich men, for them it was like the President, who thought the world smelled like fresh paint just because every place they ever went was redecorated. The world opened up for handsome.
"I don't think you have the waist," Lili said blithely. "I can't see a mite of your legs from here." She spun him a merry grin as she watched him throw open the trunk on some woman's secrets. Wedding, the old-fashioned kind with scads and scads of lace. "You can tell me secrets, if you like. You could tell me stories and I wouldn't know it, Petticoat Man so you're bound to make them good. I like stories but I don't believe in them. Maybe you're thinking I'm scammable. I don't scam," she said as she threw back the lid of a trunk bigger and more gaudy than any of them with satisfaction.
Her own things were first class. Lace and silk and a little marabou and things that tinkled enticingly from way down the sides. Lili balanced on the shod foot and began to rummage with neat little hands with fingernails painted scarlet red. "Looks real pretty but it won't sell," she said. "Not for cost. Charms mean something to a girl." Stood there, with her wrists buried in lace, and she looked at him with the kind of consideration no director thought worth putting on celluloid. "What hunt?"